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Rapid

Welcome to the RapidSeis demo. This portal was created using Rapid and enables the use of Seismic Data eXplorer within the web portal of the Network of Research Infrastructures for European Seismology.

In this study, we apply a methodology for rapid development of portlets for scientific computing to the domain of computational chemistry. We report results in terms of the portals delivered, the changes made to our methodology and the experience gained in terms of interaction with domain-specialists.

This brief tutorial covers the installation of Rapid and the components it depends on. It explains how to get a simple portlet running and then increases the complexity of this portlet to include more functionality by exploiting Rapid's features.

At the meeting we will present the result of the RapidSeis project, a collaboration between ORFEUS, the UK National e-Science Centre and the University of Liverpool. Over the past six months, this project has created a system that facilitates running waveform analysis on data from ORFEUS where the computation is performed on remote compute resources provided by the University of Liverpool.

The use of testing frameworks, such as Junit is extremely valuable. It takes quite a bit of discipline to write new unit tests for each new piece of 'real' code that is written, but the benefits in the end in terms of stability, confidence and debugging make the extra overhead more than worth it. This is especially useful in a project such as Rapid, where code is being generated. Testing in the 'traditional' way, by examining or running generated code is extremely difficult and by using testing frameworks we can actually determine correctness of Rapid, before running any generated code.

Apache's Maven project management tool (http://www.apache.org) helped the Rapid team structure code modules in a 'standardised' way. It helps managing dependencies and facilitates distributing the final product as dependencies are automatically downloaded and do not need to be packaged separately. However, the learning curve is rather steep and even now we sometimes have to go back to ANT (http://ant.apache.org/) to accomplish certain tasks.

Instead, they have to deal with archaic command-line tools or generic portals that mimic the technical complexity of the underlying infrastructure. These interfaces are expensive to use, require much training, and their laborious and intricate processes often lead to errors. Of course exceptions to this situation exist. The most fortunate researchers have access to web portals or scientific gateways that were built to enable their specific tasks.

Motivation: Scientific web portals are seen as the way forward to improve upon the slow uptake in use of utility computing infrastructure and high-performance computing facilities. Currently, two types of portals exist: general-purpose portals and domain-specific portals. The first type closely resembles the underlying technical infrastructure of compute-job submission systems, thereby providing little appeal to a wide range of domain specialists. The second type is tailored to the application specifications and their end-users' requirements.

Date and time:

Monday, 14 September, 2009 - 11:10

Location:

IWPLS’09 International Workshop on Portals for Life Sciences, e-Science Institute, Edinburgh, UK

Rapid is a unique approach to quickly designing and delivering web portal interfaces for applications that require large amounts of computing resources or that need to run on specific servers. We will demonstrate the success of Rapid in a number of projects across a wide range of disciplines: brain imaging, chemistry, microscopy, engineering and seismology.

We show a screencast of an example portal created using Rapid, which enables perfusion imaging in the context of brain imaging for stroke. To see this demo you require Flash to be installed. Perfusion imaging allows locating which parts of the brain are affected by a stroke in terms of oxygen deprivation.